Wildfrost Review: Deckbuilding in a Winter Wonderland

screenrant.com:

Deadpan Games’ new roguelite card combat game is impressive. The meticulously designed, visually engaging, unassumingly complex experience shines in harmony with the game's immediate cartoon veneer. Its early hours are not substantively different from its tenth or twentieth, but ’s mechanical depth manages to be much more effective and absorbing than most other deckbuilders boasting much larger card libraries.

After previewing late last year the limited demo absolutely impressed, and now a little more storytelling is peppered in throughout the game. At the start of each run, players become a new tribe leader in the solitary outpost of Snowdwell, civilization’s final bastion in a world where the sun has frozen over. These heroes make their way through wintry biomes, battles, and bosses, recruiting new card companions and collecting items, all along a forking road which eventually leads to the Sun Temple.

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persists as the most readily available comparison and inspiration; that contemporary classic deckbuilder shares ’s prioritization of hero cards, leaders, boss fights, and lane positioning, but there’s much more in-battle flexibility here. Two lanes afford space for a maximum of twelve cards on the battlefield – six for each side – but, in an ingenious stroke, players can hustle around their active cards in between turns without penalty, opening up new tactics at every step and infusing the card-based gameplay with a refreshing feeling of agency. Injured cards can even be shuffled back into the deck to be healed at no cost.

Since eschews energy systems (a rare quality among deckbuilders), virtually all action is predicated on turns and time. Most character cards have a